Paste your essay in here…Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a feminist philosophical text that seems to pit reason against passion, shaming the one who falls prey to her emotions. It is only fair to note that this early attempt in radical feminist thought does its best to carve equality into the framework of a sexist society, without turning away the audience it’s intended for: men. Wollstonecraft thus appeals to misogynistic male insecurities, makes convoluted arguments for the equal education of sexes, and takes rigid stances against arbitrarily gendered elements of human nature, like the characterization of sensibility as a weak, feminine attribute. In her attempt to pull women out of the misogynistic societal nurture of extreme emotionality, Wollstonecraft does a lot of work in the text to devalue passion and develop a strong case for education, almost making the two seem mutually exclusive. However, her defining argument for female education is subtly interwoven within another rhetorical appeal: religion. Wollstonecraft, while seemingly defining reason and passion in mutually exclusive terms, actually explains how the two can coexist to reach a level of spiritual closeness with God. This paper will argue that Wollstonecraft, by stressing the value of equal knowledge as a basis of understanding passion, reconciles the quest for virtue with the quest for eternal salvation. Thus, Wollstonecraft’s argument, taken a step further, binds immortality in as the common denominator between reason, sensibility, and God, arguing essentially that one who does not allow for women’s education is committing not only an injustice against women, but a blasphemous crime against God.
Wollstonecraft’s attack on love is one of the most prevalent instances in which she seemingly denies the coexistence of passion and reason, saying that “In a great degree, love and friendship cannot subsist in the same bosom; even when inspired by different objects they weaken or destroy each other,” (145). Why does Wollstonecraft take such a stance against love? Because she is invoking the only definition of “love” that seems to be prevalent during her time: sexual passion built on male gratification; a field for the demonstration of male dominance. Of course, this long-established tradition, as Wollstonecraft argues, is created by an early-on inflammation of the senses which makes women internalize some constructed identity as sensible, irrational, and inferior femmes. Women are nurtured into sensibility because female education emphasized emotion, turning women into irrationally sexual beings subordinate to logical men, both internally and externally. This does not bode well with Wollstonecraft, who unleashes a full attack on the concept of “love” and its misogynistic foundations of female superficiality and irrational weakness. Thus, it makes sense that she insists friendship, a relationship built on the virtue of respect, cannot exist in harmony with “love,” especially when the latter is rooted in female sexual subordination and extravagant male displays of power. Her qualms are not with the passion that brings about love, her qualms are with the construction of illegitimate passion in women by creating this false identity for them through a biased faux-education. The only way to legitimize passion is to support it by reason. So, we begin to see two kinds of passions outlined in Wollstonecraft’s philosophy: love and spirituality. The former is illegitimate, and the latter is legitimate. Wollstonecraft takes this analysis a step further, and begins her incorporation of legitimate passion, spiritual closeness to God, with her arguments for educating women.
In chapter V of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft begs an important question of her readers, saying “Perhaps it is necessary for virtue first to appear in a human form to impress youthful hearts… He who loves not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God?” (183). This quote is important because it makes several things clear to the reader. First of all, Wollstonecraft clearly has two different definitions of love: the earlier definition we explored, that “love” is an illegitimate and emotional ploy for male sexual domination, and this new definition of a divine love, one built on reason and virtue. One love expressed in the harmful physical display of love, in the subjugation of a group of people, and the second love expressed in a rational display of virtue and understanding. In this paper, we will refer to the former expression of sexual domination as “love” (in quotations), and the latter form of reason-based respect/spiritual closeness as love (without quotations). Second, Wollstonecraft’s ideas of interpersonal relationships are similar to her ideas of divine relationships. She asks, how can someone who doesn’t respectfully love a physical human being he can see, presumably a man who sexually exploits a woman incapable of reasoning, be virtuous enough to create a spiritual, metaphysical relationship with an unseen deity? The answer here is clear: he can’t. If one is incapable of respecting another human being through love, it means they do not possess the knowledge to act upon a virtue like respect, and thus cannot possibly possess the bandwidth of consciousness for divine love. It’s here that Wollstonecraft explicitly conveys the mutual exclusivity of “love” and reason, and intertwines the necessity of respecting women in the quest for eternal salvation.
Wollstonecraft takes this case a step further, claiming that using sex as a vehicle for arbitrary power violates not only the personal integrity of women, but in fact denies God and the rationality of existence. Which begs the question: how does blasphemy tie into sexual domination? To answer this, we must first understand Mary Wollstonecraft’s definition of God. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she depicts a God that is just and rational; a deity that must be “loved… as the fountain of wisdom, goodness, and power,” (Wollstonecraft, 114). Wollstonecraft also rationalizes that God endowed human beings alike with “sublime emotions” excited by the “discovery of his wisdom and goodness… set in motion to improve our nature,” so that human beings may “[enjoy] a more godlike portion of happiness,” (79). These characterizations are important because they create two base assumptions about God from which Wollstonecraft’s arguments arise: God is virtuous, and God wants humans to use reason and intrinsic emotion to gain some form of divine happiness by way of virtue. Essentially, Wollstonecraft sets a foundational base for spiritual perfectibility on the premise of education: reason begets legitimate emotion and virtue, virtue begets perfectibility, perfectibility begets a spiritual happiness, and spiritual happiness begets eternal salvation or immortality. Without reason, one cannot legitimately tap into their sublime emotions, one cannot attain virtue, and one cannot adequately worship God.
When we analyze the relationship between men and women depicted by Wollstonecraft, against the backdrop of her definitions of God and love, we can clearly see the religious appeal she is making for women’s equal education. This appeal is tied together with one specific and subtle assumption: that every soul is entitled to eternal salvation through God. Thus, Wollstonecraft’s argument flows logically. If God is a virtuous deity that commands virtue, and if virtue can only be attained by invoking emotions under the light of reason, then every soul must acquire reason to make virtuous decisions that will bring them closer to God and immortality. Wollstonecraft insists that these spiritual guidelines apply to men and women alike, saying “Connected with man as daughters, wives, and mothers… the grand end of their exertions should be to unfold their own faculties and acquire the dignity of conscious virtue… never forget, in common with man, that life yields not the felicity which can satisfy an immortal soul,” (91-92). The idea here is that the soul is genderless. Though Wollstonecraft, admittedly, does make some sexist comments on the natural duties of men and women, those gender divides do not factor in her spiritual arguments because the soul is without sex when it comes to spiritual closeness to God. This is important, because if you oppose the equal education of women, you are denying their souls a chance at eternal salvation, or the “felicity” of an immortal afterlife. And if you deny them that right, then you either do not believe in God, or you simply do not care, and either way, as Wollstonecraft argues, this denial is among other things, blasphemous, offensive to the virtuous nature of God, and contrary to the rationality of existence. “The stamen of immortality, if I may be allowed the phrase, is the perfectibility of human reason,” Wollstonecraft states, supporting her foundations of a rational existence (121).
Through rigid stances against constructions of love that force women to internalize a sexual subordination for male gratification, and by constructing her own take on a legitimate form of divine love, Wollstonecraft weaves a complex spiritual argument for female education. Wollstonecraft invokes God in her argument, because God commands the emancipation of women, implicitly and explicitly. She makes it clear that she does not “wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves” (Wollstonecraft, 133). This power can only be given to women by way of reason, and through this can come many other good things for which Wollstonecraft makes a case: happiness, understanding, respect, value, and most of all, eternal salvation. Who are men to come between a soul and its quest for virtue and eternal salvation, as commanded by God?